Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Using the above button will bring you to many wonderful posts by bloggers following NaBloPoMo's May 2012 theme of "Play". Today's prompt is:

Who did you play with as a child?

I had a great small-town childhood in Cumberland, MD. Everybody knew about half the rest of the town. I can't think of a single kid in the neighborhood with whom I did not play as a child.

Our next-door neighbors to the right (looking out our front door) had two boys, one older and one younger than me. The older boy was into GI Joe...I guess you would call them "action figures" today. His mother came up with the idea for him to get money to buy more outfits and gear by forming a GI Joe club amongst the neighborhood kids and having them pay her son dues. Yeah.

The next-door neighbor on the other side had three boys. One was about my age and he and I got teased a lot about being "boyfriend and girlfriend" ... when we were FIVE YEARS OLD! Trouble was, his family was Catholic and we were of a Protestant denomination. And at that time (early to mid 60's) and in that place...that was one barrier that did not get crossed very often. I got one of the biggest shocks of my young life when we walked up a ramp to the clubhouse of a private swimming pool and there was a sign "No Catholics Allowed". Even then, I knew there was something 'not quite right' (my words) about that.

Of course, the neighborhood was not all boys. There was a family with three girls, the youngest being my age. We would play tag in their back yard, skip rope with other friends, and chase 'lightning bugs' on summer evenings. There was a divorced (?) woman from Germany with one son and one daughter. We did quite a bit with them, as my mother was born in Switzerland and they could speak German together.

Wow. I haven't thought of some of these people in A.G.E.S. We moved from Maryland to Utah shortly after my 10th birthday and I only saw some of them once more, on a vacation (for me) and business trip (for my Dad) the next summer. I kept in touch with a couple of the girls for several years by mail (what they called 'snail mail' in my day), but even that stopped by the time high school rolled around. How sad.

So many good prompts and groups and hops to follow this month, the first of which is the Blog Dare group prompt on the Bloggy Moms site. Tiffany Noth, top banana at Bloggy Moms is doing 366 days of prompts for the group this year, and that is ONE TALL ORDER. So her prompt for May 1st, 2012 is:

Well....I had an experience a week or two ago that ... just made those little MamaBear hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I had recently volunteered to pick up an older woman who lives near me for church on Sundays. She is in a wheelchair and next time we will try the Ford Escort, because getting her in and out of the GMC Suburban is just not happening. I stopped by her senior apartment the day before Sunday a week ago and her nephew and his fiancee had moved out, while her own fiance had moved in, and he would be going to church as well. They are both in their 60's or 70's I would say.

I mentioned that it was lucky only my daughter was going with us as if my boys were going as well, there would not be enough room for the four of us and the two of them in the Escort (it only has two doors). The man then said, "Well, one of your kids could sit on my lap." Ok, I'll put myself out quite a bit to help the less fortunate, but that is where I draw the line...letting one of my children sit on the lap of a man I've only met twice? I think NOT. It might have been a perfectly innocent comment, I don't know...I just felt really uncomfortable with it.